


Horses

by EasyThereGenius



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Western, Cowboys, Gen, Western, Wild West
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 16:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1906323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EasyThereGenius/pseuds/EasyThereGenius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the so-called Wild West, there is a town called Destiny. However, Lieutenant-Colonel Young is hoping that is the place is anyone's destiny, it's not his. Especially not if it also includes the odd foreigner, "Doc" Rush....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm collating this AU here from Tumblr and LH and various places because it's much easier to keep track of here. Just to be clear, yes, I know Young's a full Colonel in the series: this is what the magic of AU allows.

Horses.

Horses were the problem.

Lieutenant-Colonel Young rested his weight briefly on his good leg and gave the sweating, blown quarter-horse in front of him another slow, assessing look through narrowed eyes.

The ground around them was the ubiquitous yellow-dun of the endless mesa, the grass fading to straw in another relentless summer that never seemed to end. Ugly clouds of dust were still curling to rest after the battle, and Young could taste the grit in his mouth. His horse blew out a sad, slobbering breath. The flies were gathering about it, black around the white flecks of froth that wreathed its soft mouth. Blood in the froth, too, as it dripped to the dust.

Young resisted the urge to sigh, because the clogged air would just have been far too unpalatable, and moved forward to place his fingers inside the beast’s mouth, running the tips over the teeth and lips. The creature lipped and jawed, hoping for water. He couldn’t find a cut or bite in the mouth, and the bit hadn‘t chafed it raw. If that blood was coming from the horse’s lungs, it was good only for dogmeat.

The problems with damn horses were legion: worse than sheep for diseases and injuries and just collapsing for no obviously available reason, in Young’s experience. This one had comported itself better than most: standing firm while others died around them, not losing its footing when the bodies underfoot had become impossible not to trample. Deep down, riding horses hated trampling on people more than poison. Young’s horse - nameless, as it had been a replacement at the last town for a horse little more than spare ribs under a skin - had blood splashed up its legs to the hock.

It was, however, the last horse left standing amongst the corpses riddled with arrows and buckshot. The rest were fled, dead, or dying.

Apart from one. The fleabitten appaloosa thirty feet away, standing head hanging with its back to Young, lead reins loose, and saddle empty. No, not quite empty. The sole of a boot, pointing to the skies and spur winking in the harsh light, was just visible behind the horn of the saddle.  
Young brushed a smear of grime from his forehead and shaded his eyes. The boot twitched, began to twist and thrash as the unseated rider tried to right himself.  
Okay, so maybe horses weren’t the only problem after all.  It was traditionally about this time that Young raised a curse squarely in the direction of Custer. Without that damn  preening fool’s discovery of gold in 1874, the Great Plains would have been far less full of these soft men with their hard eyes and bellies full of nothing but desire for wealth.

Sometimes, usually at these times when the air stank of blood and the flies seemed to be breeding independently out of the dirt, Young could almost see why the Sioux were angry with them.

Leading his exhausted horse, leaning on its heaving flank, he moved. It was a long thirty feet, punctuated with the detritus of the raid. The appaloosa whickered at him, rolling eyes back in pained warning. It was dying.

The man revealed hanging upside-down from the saddle, boot wedged firmly through the stirrup, looked up at him in a swaying halo of dirty hair, pupils pin-pricked in the sun. Coughed, once, painfully, before speaking.

“Where - the fuck - is my hat?”

The accent was unfamiliar, the tone decidedly more angry than any miner who’d just had his behind pulled out of a scalping had any right to be. Young considered this opening sally for a long moment, allowing the dust to clear a little and the sound of men slowly dying around them to filter into the gap.

“Hell if I know,” he said. “But if it helps, you’ve got your pick of replacements.”

His name was Doc Rush. This was not, apparently, a joke.

Young had stood back for far longer than was actually polite and watched the doc struggle with his tack problem before finally stepping in and cutting him loose with a sweep of his knife at the strained leather strap. The spotted horse, unbalanced by the sudden shift of weight as its rider jolted to the ground, collapsed almost on top of him.  
Swearing, the man scrabbled away as the stricken animal thrashed and squealed in the dirt. The arrow was visible now, buried up to the flights in the horse’s belly and drooling blood in a steady stream.

Young watched dispassionately, his own horse huffing laboured breaths into his ear. The hum of flies seemed to get louder as the fallen animal’s cries grew weaker and its neck dropped to the ground.

“Jesus,” the man said, drawing his skinny legs up to his chest and yanking on his battered boot to pull it properly free of the remains of the stirrup. “Jesus _fuck_.”

Young eyed him. Introductions had been minimal: limited to names. The doc’s much-mourned missing hat would have completed an ensemble of mismatched clothes that had all the hallmarks of having belonged to a succession of older (and larger) brothers. Or possibly, thought Young shrewdly as he watched the only other survivor of the latest Sioux massacre get to his feet, they’d belonged to larger men who’d not been quick enough on the draw. Guns gleamed dully on the doc’s hips under the swing of his dusty long buckskin waistcoat. Not fancy new guns like Young was used to seeing on the gold-hunters he’d come across so many time. These were not a pair, for a start. The holster on the left suggested a gun with an unusually long barrel -

The doc noticed Young’s interest and dropped his gaze, turning so the coat covered the irons. There was blood on his face and he concentrated intently on wiping it away with his sleeve. His shirt had obviously once been white, but was now lined with grimy dun folds along the joint of the elbows where the dust and sweat had got in and decided to stay. Being that here “Doc” could mean anything from sheep-doctor to barber to dentist and a million things in between, not least of which was “the carpenter who cut off my brother’s leg with his saw when he got the gangrene”, Young didn’t find the honorific at all useful.

“You know, I may be wrong,” said Young, matter-of-factly, “and there are plenty of men, specially out here, who’d say just that - but I don’t think Jesus got anything to do with it.”

The man gave him a slit-eyed, unimpressed stare and picked up a hat from the ground. Too big. And black. He discarded it and started walking over to the next fallen body, which was lying half across a paler, whiter hat. The appaloosa had blown out its last breath by the time he’d tried this one on, again discarded it.

“Hey.”

Young wasn’t used to being ignored this completely.

“Hey. D _oc.”_

Fitting a dusty grey hat over his greying hair, Rush finally acknowledged him.

“Where were you going, anyway? Nearest mining settlement’s at least a fortnight‘s ride. You don’t look like you got enough supplies for a journey that long.”  
Rush seemed to assess him for a moment, then nodded.

“We were heading for the trading post first. Pick up supplies.”

Young walked after him, leading the horse. The bodies were now all too visible now the dust had settled or cleared. The doc’s party had been too small, too unprepared. They looked too much like the men who filled up every frontier town: buoyed up with hopes, dreams, visions - but no muscle, no talent for survival. One of the bodies was overweight and wearing expensive boots. And next to him, a fluttering of petticoats in the dry wind, flying up to cover the dead face of the woman and exposing the rest of her to eternal ridicule.

Too few. Too undefended. These were the wrong people in the wrong place. Again Young cursed the gold fever and the romanticised dream of life in the West. City folk had no right being here. This is what it got them.

He was starting to wonder where Rush fitted in. The man looked like a local scrapper, with his worn clothes and tired, angry eyes. And then there were the guns.  
He had his back to Young, now, and Young thought he saw the thin shoulders sag a little. A flicker of recognition sparked.

“You were supposed to be protecting them,” he said, “weren’t you?”

Rush didn’t reply. He delivered a swift kick to the body of a fallen Sioux, then turned and started walking away. Repeated shouts failed to slow him.  
Young swung up on the horse and urged it into an amble after him. It didn’t take long to draw level. Rush refused to look, even when the horse shoved him with its nose, still hoping for water.

“Really. You’re going to walk to the trading post.”

“Look, I don’t need your help.”

“Mine or the uniform’s? If it helps, I don’t have a lot of love for where it’s got me either.”

Rush put on a burst of speed, and Young kicked into a trot, circling him, blocking him with the creature’s flank.

“Just get up here. I‘m not leaving you out here.”

He reached down and grabbed the scruff of Rush’s coat. After a second’s pure fury (Young could feel it through the leather) the doc twisted, grabbed the saddle strap and pulled up behind him, doing his utmost to try and keep body contact to a minimum despite the close quarters of the saddle.

Luckily for the exhausted horse, Rush turned out to weigh very little.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was something about the man he’d rescued that made him feel like complications were busting out all over

The town of Destiny, thought Young, barely lived up to the promise of its name. Hope, Salvation - there were a million towns with optimistic names like this one: clinging to their foothold in the wilderness with the tenacity of a goat clinging to the side of a cliff. And just like that goat, they were often mean, smelly and ornery. He though he heard Rush snort behind him as the first town markers came into view and the pitches of roofs began to edge above the horizon, although it could have been a snore. He’d suspected more than once that the man had fallen asleep in the saddle during their ride, feeling the unaccustomed weight against his back and (more noticeable) a slackening of the palpable waves of animosity that radiated from the doc like heat. 

The weary horse ambled on along the dirt track, past the sign that declared: “Destiny: established who the hell knows.” Somebody in the town clearly had a sense of humour. Underneath had been chalked the ubiquitous “Population: 88”. It didn’t look like the number had gone up in a while, but on the plus side it didn’t seem to have gone down rapidly either. 

It was early morning, the sun just rising over the mountains far distant. Young had been enjoying the moment of growing warmth: his favourite part of the day, when the excessive chill of the night was yet to push into the interminable heat of noon. They were almost out of water, and another day of heat would have finished them off. 

The ride had been long, and felt longer. His attempts at conversation with Rush had been limited and mostly rebuffed. It’s hard to talk to someone who’s stuck behind you with his head roughly at the level of mid-shoulderblade, and Young hadn’t been able to rid himself of the suspicion that, unseen,  Rush was curling his lip, rolling his eyes, and making many other disrespectful expressions at every conversational sally he essayed. They’d established that he was from England and that he didn‘t like dogs, but that was about it. He also smelt pretty bad, stuck this close - but Young considered that he probably wasn’t any rose garden either. 

They hadn’t talked about the dead soldiers from Young’s column, or the dead civilians of Rush’s party. Neither brought it up. Young was curious, but he was bone-tired and sore in his own loss. It could wait, or if it waited long enough, Rush would be gone from his charge and it simply wouldn’t matter. Young liked his situations uncomplicated, and there was something about the man he’d rescued that made him feel like complications were busting out all over.

For the last few hours Rush’s silence had deepened from prickly antagonistic silence to unresponsive, obdurate silence; and that was when Young suspected he was asleep. He tested this hypothesis.

“Hey, Doc. We’re almost there.”

No change in atmosphere. The horse‘s hooves pounded the dirt, rhythmical, the saddle creaking, the metal of the bit clinking dully as the animal‘s head bobbed with its tired gait. “Doc.”

Young transferred the reins to the saddle horn and gently pushed an elbow backward, contacting Rush’s ribs. Rush gave a cry completely out of proportion to the strength of the push, and his whole body stiffened, contracted as he doubled over. A hand slapped at Young’s intruding elbow.

“You bastard,” he hissed, when he got his breath back. “What was that for?”

“We’re here,” Young said, calmly. 

And they were. 

The horse, evidently as relieved as they were to be back in (quasi) civilisation, plodded on determinedly down the main street. Young felt the eyes on him, or, more accurately, on his uniform.

It struck him again, acutely, as it had been doing occasionally during their long ride here, that he was the last. His column were all dead. He and this foreign doctor, the only remnants of their respective lives. He felt rather than saw Rush staring around them, as if looking for something specific. Probably the general stores. There were a few signs of life in the early day: the gawkers already out on the porches, a woman leaning warily out of a window, shaking out a battered-to-unrecognisible garment.

No children. That was odd. Not even really any animals. There was something clogged and unhealthy about the air in the place, as if it had been dead for centuries and was having a hard time of its resurrection.  Sound seemed muffled - the horse’s dragging hooves made soft, dead sounds in the dust of main street.

If this place was really someone’s Destiny, Young couldn’t help hoping that it wasn’t his.  Something smelt wrong here, like the rank closeness under a porch in high summer when something had crawled in and died.

A tug and roll of the saddle drew his attention back to immediate things. Behind him, Rush was starting to dismount, even though the horse was still continuing its determined search for a trough or a stable. Young yanked on the reins, starting to feel an ache starting behind his eyes as the sun began to brighten into its habitual searing brilliance. The man didn’t even have to talk to be a pain in the ass.

“Trading post is that way,” he said, raising his voice as Rush freed his boot from the stirrup and strode off in a contrary direction, his gait rapid and strange. “Hey. If you’re in such a hurry -”

Dirt scraped loudly as Rush stopped, not dead still but swaying now. In that moment Young abruptly recognised the way he was standing, recognised the posture, and swore under his breath before raising his voice.

“Doc. Hey, Rush. I -”

Rush dropped, all of a sudden and all of a heap. Dust puffed up in clouds around him and Young’s horse skittered, huffing nervously, as Young swung down with alacrity.

There had been a man in Young’s column who had been a veteran of the first Indian skirmishes - Franklin, his name had been - and he’d managed to hide a gangrenous slash across the ribs for over three weeks before finally just falling from his horse during the longest, hottest day of the year. The smell should have tipped them off, but nothing smells good after almost a year in the saddle. That and the fact that he’d kept his coat buttoned tight despite the heat. Franklin had died out there and they’d buried him unmarked, doing the best they could with the empty landscape. A few rocks. A stick. That loss had hurt Young more than most because he felt he could have done something. No, should. Should have done something. Franklin had had a family. People who would miss him. And now that family wouldn’t even have a body to bury decently.

Rush had been standing the same way Franklin had stood every time they’d stopped and dismounted for that three weeks. Taking too much care, holding himself too straight.

Goddamnit, the man was wounded and Young hadn’t even noticed until it was too late. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to notice because the man was such a piece of work. His sense of responsibility, blunted by the trauma of losing his men, roared back up into life as he approached the crumpled form. Rush was face down in the dirt, his head and his dirty hair spilling over his outflung hand.

Young turned him over carefully, reaching down to his own belt and digging out his flask. He dribbled water through Rush’s cracked, pale lips.

“Were you even drinking, you stupid son of a bitch,” he murmured. Rush didn’t stir. Water leaked from the corner of his slack mouth and out into the dust.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Young looked up, squinting, hand raised against the climbing sun. A woman was silhouetted against the light, wisps of blond hair escaping her hat and haloing her head.

“Do you need any help?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just to prove I'm still here, still love SGU and am still capable of writing. Sort of.

She was a midwife.

That was all he needed. A reminder of all the parts of his life he’d left behind. Everything he’d turned his back on when he’d joined the army. There had been a girl - no, there had been a _woman_ , he hadn’t been young enough for _girls_ for a long time -

But that was another unproductive thought which led places Young didn’t need to go. The memory of the woman was pushed firmly back into the depths where he was keeping the memories of the recent massacre. Hell, he’d rather keep death at the front of his mind right now.

The midwife was running her fingers over Rush in a detached sort of way, like he was a piece of dough not raising right, and then she looked up at Young.

“Friend of yours?”

She didn’t have the simpering deference of the society women Young had occasionally brushed with, nor the hardbitten, almost-male jollity of the usual frontier whores. Her clothes were good: not expensive, but good, and carefully looked after. Daughter of a local merchant, Young put her at, or maybe the farrier. Not married.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

She gave a wry sort of smile and Young began to like her in spite of himself.

“I’ll take responsibility for him, I guess,” he went on, watching her fingers work around Rush’s temples, his pulse points. “There anywhere hereabouts I can take him?”

“Depends how much you feel responsible.” Her hand pressed around Rush’s chest area and she frowned. “And how badly you’d feel about him getting robbed.”

The odd surge of protectiveness and guilt that had claimed Young when Rush had pitched over came creeping back.

“Pretty badly,” was all he said.

“Then you’d better not take him to Brody’s.”

Young narrowed his eyes at the faded candy-stripe hoarding that headed what was obviously the local bar. It looked quiet. Dilapidated, like the rest of this godforsaken place, but sleepy. Didn’t look the kind of place for trouble, but you couldn’t really tell at dawn what a place got up to at dusk.

“He’s not gonna be up for a while,” said the midwife. “And unless you’re planning to sit by his bedside and hold his hand all the while, someone’s likely to come in and take his boots.” She twitched aside a fold of the battered leather coat, raised her delicate eyebrows, and flipped it back again. “And his guns.”

Young gave this due consideration: then he reached down and slid the buckle on the doc’s gunbelt. There were bloodstains etched deep into the leather, and the guns as he pulled them loose were heavier than he’d expected. Again he felt a twinge of unease. Rush wasn’t what he appeared to be. There was obviously a story back behind these guns and that little band of civilians and Rush stuck out of it like a sore thumb.

He slung the belt and holsters over his own shoulder, then tilted his chin at the woman.

“There. That’s one problem solved.” He privately thought that he actually felt more comfortable himself with Rush unarmed, although he wasn‘t at all sure the doc was going to share the goodwill when he woke up. If he woke up. “So where can I take him?”

She looked pensive and wary for a moment, then: “That your horse too?”

“It is now.”

Her wary look deepened.

“You can put them both in my stable,” she said, eventually, and chewed her lip briefly as if the decision pained her. “There’s a pallet there for him, with a straw tick, and the horse can go in with the mule, less’n he minds sharing.”

“If he does, I’ll put the doc in with the mule and the horse can have the pallet.”

She laughed, then put her hand over her mouth to cover the amusement. “He’s a doctor?”

“Kind of. I don’t know him real well.”

“Well, that’d be great,” she went on, rising from her crouch next to Rush and sweeping a hand down her dusty skirts. “The men in this town don’t always take kindly to having their bodies tended to by a woman. I could use the help.”

Young huffed out a breath, amused, and bent to slip his arms around Rush’s body, struck once again by how light and ridiculously bony the man was under the baggy clothes.

“I don’t think the doc here’s one of life’s natural helpers.”

“And I thought you didn’t know him very well.”

“Don’t need to, to know that.”

They stood there in the new sun on Main Street, Young cradling the body in his arms and the woman eyeing them both assessingly for a long moment.

“Tamara Johansen,” she said. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Lieutenant-Colonel Young. A pleasure,” said Young, and was surprised to realise that he meant it. “And the doc’s name is Rush.”

Her attention drawn back to the patient, Johansen turned and started back across the street, heading for the turn in the road. “He’s got some broken ribs,” she said. “We’d best get him laid down and comfortable before he wakes up.”

 

As it turned out, when Rush woke up, he was neither comfortable nor unarmed.

 


End file.
